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McAlmont, Stephenhero and lyrical verite
In the past two weeks I’ve managed to have long conversations with two of my musical heroes, which has been very exciting, as well as reinforcing what I already felt about the things that make you happy and the things that don’t.
The first was David McAlmont, who I interviewed for Scotland on Sunday about an album he’d made with Michael Nyman called The Glare. It’s a fascinating, unusual album - McAlmont wrote lyrics for ten pieces of music by Nyman that had previously been released as instrumentals, mostly on film soundtracks (the music for the song in the link above, Secrets Accusations and Charges, is from Gattaca). Partly because he was writing words for a composer he really admired, so wanted to do something substantial, and partly because he was just bored of singing about ‘my tragic love life’, he came up with the idea of basing the lyrics on newspaper stories from the past couple of years. The album is called The Glare because all the people in the songs - from Susan Boyle to Samantha Orobator, the pregnant British woman locked up in Laos this year for heroin smuggling - have been caught in the glare of the 24-hour news media, like rabbits in headlights.
It’s a neat idea, a ‘21st century portrait’ as McAlmont put it, although I’m not absolutely convinced it works. He has too distinctive a voice to take on so many different characters, maybe - he’s a wonderful singer, but a leading man rather than a character actor. Whether you think that matters perhaps depends on what you think he’s doing, though. Like docudrama, The Glare inhabits an interesting grey area somewhere between art and reportage - between truth and fiction, I might say, if these weren’t such slippery terms (even the straightest piece of reportage has an angle).
McAlmont called his writing technique, half-jokingly, ‘lyrical verite’, then told me his friend Patrick had come up with the phrase. ‘Patrick Fitzgerald?’ I said. Yes, he exclaimed, surprised I knew who he meant. Of course I did. Patrick Fitzgerald is one of my all time musical heroes, and I have rhapsodised about him on a previous blog here. The songs he wrote for the band Kitchens of Distinction are one of the main reasons why I write lyrics the way I do, and why I sing the way I do.
McAlmont told me Patrick had a new album out shortly, that it was written in a ‘lyrical verite’ style too, and that David sang backing vocals on it. He’s listed in the credits of Patrick’s album as ‘rock of ages’, which I thought was very sweet. It turns out that they’ve been best friends for years and regularly phone each other up to gab about what they’ve been reading and listening to.
So the next day, still wearing my music journalist hat, I went in search of Patrick. Although I’ve been a fan since I was a teenager he had slipped off my radar in recent years - slipped off everyone’s radar really. After Kitchens of Distinction broke up he made one jubilant, inventive, angry, funny, poignant, lovely album as Fruit, which I bought, then he began releasing music under the name Stephenhero, which I didn’t buy, having become sidetracked by other musical things I suppose, or because I could never find shops that sold it (these were the dark days before Amazon).
For a while Patrick wrote music for theatre and film. Then he got sick - a kidney failure which pretty much stopped him from working at all. Then his mum died. A dark time. Then, last year, he got a new kidney (he doesn’t know who from, but is profoundly grateful). Earlier this year he and his long-term boyfriend had a civil partnership ceremony. And now he has a new album out, Apparition in the Woods, which he thinks is the best thing he’s ever done.
I’m still too obsessive about those old Kitchens recordings to fully agree with him on that, but I like it very much. Mostly performed on the piano, Apparition in the Woods has a similar atmosphere to PJ Harvey’s White Chalk. Lyrically, it tells various stories of gay men in love and in turmoil, from Walt Whitman and Jean Genet to Pierre Steel, a Frenchman who watched his lover being mauled to death by dogs in a concentration camp during World War Two.
I found out some of this from a press release sent to me by Patrick’s label, some from Patrick himself during the 45-minute phone interview that followed (which I’ll write up properly for the Scotsman in the next couple of weeks, although possibly at less length than here since Patrick is not famous enough, nor Scottish enough, for me to argue persuasively for a big chunk of space in a place like that).
Patrick turned to lyrical verite for different reasons from David. He wrote the music for Apparition in the Woods while he was sick, hence its melancholy atmosphere, but his head was too fuzzy to come up with words so he never finished the songs. Then he got well, was too happy to write appropriately sad lyrics, so decided to tell other people’s sad stories instead.
In the great McAlmont VS Stephen Hero lyrical verite face-off, Patrick wins, I reckon. The way he has always written about homosexuality - straightforward but poetic, fearless but vulnerable, gritty but tender, and with none of the high camp that is often expected from ‘gay music’ - is his great strength as a lyricist, although it possibly held Kitchens of Distinction back commercially. Patrick’s way of writing about being gay didn’t fit most people’s preconceptions of what ‘gay music’ should sound like, so the music press mostly dismissed them. Neither gay enough nor straight enough, and never cool enough either, in either gay terms or straight terms, they were a classic example of a band that didn’t fit, although they regularly got ecstatic reviews from a small group of supportive critics.
This, of course, could be a hardcore fan’s conspiracy theory to explain why their favourite band didn’t make it big. Perhaps, in the grand scheme of things, Kitchens of Distinction just weren’t ‘good’ enough. But it rings true for me, and makes it all the more poignant that Patrick is still writing so movingly about misfits from history (misfits, admittedly, that have endured more hardship than him).
I was going to talk about things that make you happy, but got sidetracked. I’ll do it now. Patrick and David have kept a firm hold on their artistic integrity over the years, judging by their choices, and both seem reasonably contented as a result. A few years ago, before he got sick, Patrick was forging a new career making music for theatre and film. Then he gave it up to become a doctor. It was partly a pragmatic decision - he was getting older and wanted financial security, and the thought of pinning his hopes on another insecure career that might not work out wasn’t tempting - but it also seems to have been because he preferred just to do his own music his own way, and earn money another way, than to spend a lot of time frustrated at having to compromise in order to keep directors happy. David, meanwhile, does make music full time but has never really become properly famous, also out of a reluctance to compromise.
Both, it seems to me, have reasonably fulfilled artistic lives as a result. ‘A lot of people have been frustrated with me over the years because I haven’t persevered in a commercial direction but I can’t, you know?’ David told me. ‘I have tried to become a pop singer but it just didn’t feel right.’ (He does occasionally get to do pop star-like things though, such as writing songs for Shirley Bassey’s new album, alongside people like the Pet Shop Boys and Rufus Wainwright).
Of course, both could simply be trying to justify their lack of commercial success. Maybe both are secretly miserable and desperately wish they were world famous Q magazine cover stars. Whatever. For what it’s worth, their new albums are far more interesting than just about anything else I’ve heard this year, and the fact that they’re out there in the world is enough.
Andrew
